Today we were supposed to go to the Taranto area and go wine tasting, but plans changed this morning when we found out that the Masseria for the wine tasting was closed today, so we decided to head to Matera instead and do the wine tasting on Friday. I forget to mention in the previous days that we are staying in a Masseria which means a fortified farmhouse just outside of Martina Franca. This fortified farmhouse is surrounded by a large stone wall, a gated entrance and exit, and they are in the process of building a huge spa in the back of ‘hotel.’ In our room, we have these beautiful high ceiling (like in the trulli’s) and wooded windows with lace curtains. Outside the windows there are covers to keep the warm air in because it is freezing here (average of 2-8 degrees Celsius) and we couldn’t figure out how to open them so we tried lifting them to see out the window but we couldn’t get very far up. So yesterday for the first time, mom hit a switch by mistake and it automatically opened the shades so we now know how to open them! So today we ventured to Matera, a unique town in the Basilicata region filled with Sassi’s (stone dwellings carved into ravines dating back to the 8th century B.C.). It took us about 2 hours to drive there (mom practicing her go cart racing) and we drove around the city first to find the two parts of town with the Sassi’s: the Sasso Barisano and the Sasso Caveoso (the older and prettier one). This area was really interesting especially since the area has been inhabited since the 8th century B.C. until the 1950’s. Yes, you are reading that correctly- people lived in the cave, stone houses until the 1950’s when they became so overrun with Malaria that the government forcibly removed over 15,000 people from the cave to houses outside the town. Only in 1993 was the site named a Unesco World Heritage Site. We went inside one too (it was 1.50 Euros) and saw what it was like to live in these caves- it was quite cool. After we walked around for a few hours, we started to leave and found an area across the ravine from the Sassi’s to take some nice evening photos called the Chiese Rupestri, where I think we took more photos of these cool looking cows than we did of the sassi’s! It took us much less time to get home than it did to get there as we went a different way, but overall it was a nice, historical day and very interesting.
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